


Ever After

by Jadedphase



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Gen, jasper's mom, young jasper
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-19
Updated: 2014-05-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 18:19:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1657952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jadedphase/pseuds/Jadedphase
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time there was a little boy who lived in the stars and dreamed about the fairy tales his mother told him about the world below.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ever After

"Did she ever escape?"

Some questions were so very dire when a person was small and the world felt huge even if the truth of it was only that it extended to the edge of steel walls to keep the vast amount of midnight space outside at bay.

Sometimes just walking from wall to wall in the room his family occupied made it feel too large; like his father’s shoes when he tried to wear them or his mother’s arms when they wrapped around him so entirely he thought she could have easily done so twice.

The days when everything was large and he was not were the ones where it was easy to believe in things even more impossible than that he had been born into a world where the human race lived among the stars sheltered by rivets and steel plates from the endlessness outside.

That made the possibility of something so different from the day to day norm all the more special and rare. It was little wonder he begged nearly every night, sitting on his bed with all the hopeful gaze a six year old could muster, for his mother to share with him the secrets of the stories from years and years in the past.

Stories of things he could hardly imagine; grass growing and seeing the stars from the ground, knights on horses and princesses locked away in towers miles and miles too high to ever reach the ground with nothing short of a wild escape plan.

"Did she get away?" Jasper implored once more, trying to wrap a young mind around the idea of being trapped and waiting to be saved, to be weighed down to stone rather than steel. And even more incredible; a rope of hair to aid her in her plight.

People in the past believed the funnest things, he thought, but he wanted so desperately to relive them as well.

"Oh yes, she did, in the end." Her voice was warm and patient, as mothers’ tones are often prone to being, and it brought to him comfort and what he was certain was wisdom.

"I think," she continued while drawing the blanket up around him and urging him to lie down rather than remain sitting up and hugging his pillow, "that it must have been very difficult. But sometimes the most important things to find are the hardest, and freedom is the hardest of them all."

"But the prince helped her," Jasper volunteered eagerly. He remembered that was how most of the stories went and he expected the same from this newest one, he was looking for the happy ending.

"He did," she agreed, "we all need help now and then. And he loved her from the start, you do everything you can for the people you love."

Her smile might have edged at sadness when she said it but he didn’t notice, his eyelids had dropped shut when she pressed a kiss to his forehead and only popped back open when she had drawn back.

"So she did escape in the end and went to live in a castle in a faraway land with her prince, in a place on Earth the way it used to be with rolling fields of grass and blue skies. And they were very, very happy."

She went to tuck him in once more, he was constantly fidgeting around so it took several attempts a night to convince him to settle, and he was yawning and nodding with heavy lids barely pried open.

He looked as though he might have said something else but didn’t get the chance, sleep was calling too strongly and he lost the battle; she left him to his dreams of fairy tales about a place that he really only understood to be real in the stories she told him. But it was enough for now, maybe it was a lost idea but she wouldn’t see her child grow up jaded and empty when she could give him some hint of hope in the possibilities of happily ever after.

If he would have been old enough to understand it then he would have thanked her for that gift.

 

The memory was just barely there, a faint little wisp at the corner of his mind when Jasper was years older, paused, eyes rolling upward over the crumbling remains nearly devoured by the forest around them; a stone building had existed there long ago but had been reduced by time to only broken towers slowly pulling apart under vines and weather.

"Jasper," Clarke’s voice tugged him out of thought and back into the real world with a tone that always demanded attention, "we can’t stay here, we need to keep going and get back to the camp."

"Oh, yeah."

He stumbled to catch back up, a grin lingering on his lips, earning a questioning look from Monty in passing when he glanced back a time or two until the trees swallowed the landmark back up entirely.

**Author's Note:**

> Vaguely inspired by the prompt; "Did she ever escape?"


End file.
